This breadth and depth allows organizations to meet the broadest range of BI use cases from a single platform. At its Qonnections 2016 customer and partner event, Qlik previewed functionality across the four elements of its innovation strategy – platform, data, analytics, and cloud.

AFAS Software, a fast-growing ERP software provider, has integrated Qlik Sense into its online product to provide world-class visual analytics to their AFAS Software clients. Now more than 740,000 AFAS users are able to leverage the benefits of enterprise-ready BI within their cloud-based ERP suite.

Bas van der Veldt, CEO of AFAS Software, commented: “As we set high standards for our offering, building an in-house BI solution was not an option. It would take years and we wanted to give our customers the best experience the market offers. Qlik Sense proved to be the disruptive platform we were looking for.”

Expands Platform-based Approach to Enable Data-Driven, Agile Enterprises Qlik Sense can scale to meet all the needs of individuals, groups, organizations, and developers, while maintaining the trust, security, and governance that IT requires. This accelerates organizations towards their goal of being more agile, data-driven businesses that uncover and take advantage of new possibilities.

With this latest release, Qlik has improved its management and administration capabilities to support IT with more effective auditing, configuration, and governance for broad multi-geography deployments. New user interface enhancements in the Qlik Management Console (QMC) provide easy configuration options for content and resources that drive quicker deployments, and proper use of apps, objects, and data. In addition, Qlik Sense Enterprise is now in Korean, Polish, Traditional Chinese, and Turkish.

Developers are empowered with a new development hub to more easily take full advantage of the Qlik Analytics Platform for web mashups, custom apps, extensions, and widgets, which provide new ways of designing objects to include in data-driven apps. This includes powerful new developer APIs and capabilities, including a new app integration API, a visualization API for programmatic creation of analytics, and a new integrated developer environment (IDE) plugin for Visual Studio.

“Qlik built the category for user-driven, self-service BI. With Qlik Sense, we continue to expand the market by creating a scalable, secure, and extensible platform that organizations can consider the centerpiece of their enterprise-wide BI deployment,” said Anthony Deighton, Qlik CTO and SVP of Products.

“Our platform approach allows us to address such a breadth of use cases with more depth than other offerings. The openness of our platform expands opportunities for custom analytics apps, embedded BI, and developer innovation. With our industry-leading global partner network at the ready to bring these solutions to market and our rapidly growing community of developers, we’ve hit an exciting point in the next phase of industry leadership, extending beyond visual analytics,” added Deighton.

Best-in-Class Enhancements Make App Creation, Visual Analysis, and Collaboration More Intuitive Users will benefit from new visual search capabilities that allow them to search across charts and data. In addition, visual exploration capabilities now allow users to explore and discover insights in analyses using governed metrics and dimensions – without having to rely on analysts to edit and modify visualizations. Additional functionality improves business user app creation, including time aware charts, automatic detection of geographic data, and improved application of data-driven color palettes.To drive the most value out of these visualization investments, users must be able to easily share analysis. Several new features facilitate sharing and collaboration, including storytelling that allows data stories to be directly published to Microsoft Office and PDF. In addition, Qlik NPrinting, which previously supported only QlikView, now supports Qlik Sense with new centralized pixel perfect reporting to create visually-appealing reports. This enables organizations with legacy reporting environments to move aggressively to a modern BI architecture while maintaining their requirement for statutory or compliance reporting and extending more interactive analysis to business leaders.

Bolsters Data Preparation and Ease of Connectivity to Web-based Data Sources Qlik Sense offers improved capabilities for business users to load, transform, and enrich their data without the need for complex scripting. Qlik has a new innovative, patented, user experience which makes finding and taking advantage of associations in multiple data sources a fun and engaging experience. Now dates are automatically recognized and broken down into discrete fields for analysis and a new user interface for calculated fields – with auto-complete – allows users to easily create derived fields and transform data. In addition, Qlik now directly offers broader connectivity options to more web-based data sources, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google, as well as cloud-based applications including Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SugarCRM.

Seamless Access to More On-Demand External Data Sources Enables Smarter Business Decisions With Qlik DataMarket users can access a comprehensive library of free and subscription-based external data directly within Qlik Sense and QlikView to allow users to augment and cross reference their internal data to gain context and drive deeper insights. The data available through Qlik DataMarket will be enhanced to include information from at least 35 major stock exchanges as well as demographic data at a lower level of granularity, including zip codes.

New packages include Stock and Indices, incorporating price quotes and key indicators for securities, and Company Financial Reports, containing detailed financial statements of publically-traded companies. No other vendor in the BI market delivers this type of data library that encompasses both free and paid data sources.

Unlimited App Sharing in the Cloud Supports Analytic-Driven Business Culture Qlik Sense Cloud Plus enables users to share fully interactive Qlik Sense apps with an unlimited number of other users for a monthly fee of $20 per month. The Qlik DataMarket Essentials package, which includes third-party currency, weather, social, and economic data, is also included to further enhance analysis. This means that only one user will need to subscribe to Qlik Sense Cloud Plus to share with as many other users as desired. All apps work on any device, including mobile devices, with the responsive design native to Qlik Sense smart visualizations.